UPDATES: Alternative Employment, Retirement and Economic Weakness

Are you part of the “gig economy”? Narrowly defined, this includes people who earn money through an app like Uber or Lyft, or Shipt or even AirBnb. More broadly, it can refer to the dramatically increasing numbers of people outside of traditional employment. More and more people are working as contractors and consultants and have no steady employer to provide benefits like insurance and retirement.

Are you in charge of your own retirement plans? With that responsibility comes flexibility as well. Have you considered a precious metals backed IRA? We can answer questions and help set that up!

From MarketWatch, linked below:

“To someone like me with a laser-like focus on retirement, the most obvious and serious loss for this 16 percent of the workforce is that they are not enrolled in a retirement plan. And the evidence clearly indicates that people do not go out and open up an Individual Retirement Account on their own. Moreover, I’m afraid that these people with alternative work arrangements are not going to be picked up by the state savings initiatives underway in California, Connecticut, Illinois, and Oregon. Those initiatives impose a mandate on employers that are not providing a plan to automatically enroll their workers in an IRA. The people with alternative work arrangements do not have an employer. Other routes exist for coverage, but it will not happen without some special effort.”

The increase in alternative work arrangements is not surprising, considering the tough business environment in the US, evidenced by the latest anemic GDP numbers. It is harder and harder for workers to find traditional employment with benefits as employers look to benefits packages as obligations they can eliminate.

Several economists reacts to GDP numbers in the article linked below, one of note is here:

Globally, government debt and interest rate policies are driving investors to flee bonds as a hedge in favor of gold and that is driving the price.

“Bonds will not hedge stocks if we enter a recession because central banks can’t do anything to support bonds. That means investors will look elsewhere for a hedge. Gold will be a natural conclusion.

As John Hathaway of Tocqueville Asset Management calculated, if investors were to increase their gold allocation from 0.55% (the current level) to 1.55%, that would represent 56,075 tonnes of demand. That is far more gold than is currently available in London. In fact, a 0.1% increase swamps the supply of physical gold. [2]

That is the kind of logic that backs the idea that gold has a good run ahead.”

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